Deadly Messengers (13 page)

This article had turned into a strange journey. As much as she welcomed the work, she was hankering to get back to her lollypop no-brainer articles. Even this meeting had brought her too close to her own sad memories. Doug McKinley may have found his way around grief, but she still felt on shaky ground.

Since this had all started, everything felt a little out of control. Kendall wondered where the story would take her next. She hoped back to the tried and true.

She heard the door close behind her as she walked toward her car. Words slipped through her mind. Words for the article. Words for the dark feelings stirring inside her. Words to describe how she felt, forced to address her past so unexpectedly.
Ironic
sprung to mind.

If
she
were asked to describe her feelings by some journalist asking
that
“stupid” question—
How does it feel?
—she would answer with one word.

“Dangerous.”

KATE WILKER HAD SAT AT the family gathering, listening to this crap for almost twenty minutes. In fact, she felt she’d listened to crap for most of her twelve-year marriage to
Idiot Boy
Randall.

That’s how she thought of him these days. Not Randall, the man she’d married when she was young and reckless, but Idiot Boy who was now her torturer-by-stupidity.

Young-and-reckless and desperate-to-escape-your-parents is not a good basis for marriage. How long had it taken her to realize she’d made a catastrophic mistake? Oh, about twelve months. What did she do? Silly, little twenty-two-year old she was. Did she go back to her parents? Did she do what a couple of sensible friends had done? Get a divorce?

No. no. Nooo. Kate, being stubborn Kate, refused to admit defeat. She knew her parents would rub it in, as they always did when she screwed up. So she decided if they made a couple of babies it would give her something to do. Then it’d all turn into a wonderful fairytale and they’d live happily ever after.

So, along came Joseph, then Samantha, and because Idiot Boy decided he liked having children (Who wouldn’t when you don’t have to do any of the work involved?) he convinced her one more kid would seal the deal.

Well, it didn’t.

In fact, it made everything three times as bad. Ten times as bad. One hundred times as bad. No scale was large enough to measure it, to weigh the depths of her disenchantment with her lot in marriage.

Post-natal depression. That’s what they’d called her feelings.
Discovering reality
she called them. The doctors had told her it might take years for the feelings to subside, for the hormones to settle back to normal.

The tablets they’d given her did take the edge off, but they also made her feel sluggish and she couldn’t sleep, which made her depressed, as well. So, they upped the quantities. It was like a merry-go-round with no way to get off.

How many of these tedious family birthday parties had she endured?

Let’s see, she thought, as she sat at the dining table, enveloped in over-loud chatter with kids climbing over adults as if being a parent meant you were some kind of swing set.

This gathering was to celebrate one of
his
brother’s kid’s birthdays. She thought the kid was turning six. She couldn’t really remember, there were so many of them. She added up
his
family members, including nephews and nieces, his parents and their own kids. Twenty birthdays. Then she calculated the math of the twelve years they’d been married, times the birthdays. Two hundred of these she’d endured so far, and that didn’t include Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter.

She thought forward to when the next generation grew up and married. There would be even more birthdays to attend. Kate was growing suicidal just thinking about it.

Her sister-in-law, Annette, sat to her right at the
adult’s
table; they were seated like airline cattle-class around a dining area meant to accommodate five less people. The kids, seated at a separate table, happily shouted at each other and wrestled with napkins. No doubt, as usual, they were creating a god-awful mess.

In the middle of the table, amid the coffee cups, lay a spread of cookies and cake. Kate had already eaten more than she should just to fill the time. Her head throbbed with sugar overload. And something else she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

“So the kids have grown,” said her sister-in-law, Annette.

Of course they’ve grown. That’s their job. They grow.

She was tempted to speak her thoughts, instead of her reply: “Yes, where does the time go?”

The conversations she endured at these things! Ever since she’d left the shopping mall an hour ago, after having coffee with her friend Wendy, she’d felt a building buzz in her head. She’d put it down to the thought of sitting here with
them.

The weather,
buzz-buzz
.

The kids and their activities at school,
buzz-buzz
.

The baseball score,
buzz-buzz
.

That was all Kate heard. Just a crap-load of words and a wall of noise growing ever louder until it became an itch inside her brain she couldn’t scratch.

Buzz-buzz. Blah-blah.

She’d taken an extra Prozac this morning as fortification against the relatives and her husband, who grew even more intolerable around his family. She wondered if this buzzing noise was some kind of adverse side effect from taking too many pills. The doctor had upped her dosage a few months back when she’d admitted to feeling overwhelmed.

Lately, she’d gotten to thinking what the doctor really needed to prescribe was for her to get away from Idiot Boy. Then she wouldn’t need the drugs anymore. She could get high on life.

She felt a twang in her head like something had burst. Instantly the buzz grew into a brain-numbing pain akin to someone digging around in her head with a needle.

Kate scanned the table, staring at her in-laws merrily chatting, sipping and eating, eating and sipping. She felt increasingly distanced from them as though she were inside a bubble travelling backward, an alien observing strange earth creatures.

One of the children ran past and bumped her elbow just as she raised her coffee cup to her lips. Coffee sloshed into her lap. When she looked down, light brown spots colored her cream skirt.

Stupidly-inane-Annette immediately grabbed a glass of water from the table, plunged in her napkin, and dabbed the cloth over the brown marks as though she was killing a bug. Then she grabbed the edge of Kate’s skirt and examined her handiwork.

“It’s okay.” Kate desperately wanted her sister-in-law to just let go of her skirt.

“No, I don’t mind, really. Let’s see if I can get it out. It might stain permanently otherwise.”

She called to Kate’s other sister-in-law, My-kids-are-better-than-yours, and said, “Do you have any soda water, Helen? Kate’s spilled some coffee on herself.”

She
spilled coffee on herself! Right, it couldn’t conceivably be one of their precious little darlings, could it? Kate glowered at Annette, who was far too busy dabbing and pulling at Kate’s skirt to notice. Her sister-in-law’s actions made her headache worse. She needed to make her stop.

Kate slowly lowered her palm over Annette’s hand and clasped it tight. She leaned in, until only inches separated her lips from her sister-in-law’s ear, and whispered through gritted teeth, “Annette, it’s
okay
. Would you please take your hands off me?
Please
.”

Annette’s assured expression faltered. Her hands, so busy seconds before, retreated to rest in her lap like little, scavenging crabs scurrying back under shelter.

“I was only trying to help. Are you all right, Kate? You look tired.”

Kate stared at her. She would have answered, but white noise now filled her mind, and she couldn’t find the words. Then it came to her. She didn’t need the words because none of this mattered.

Kate stood, ignoring Annette’s continued questioning about her wellbeing, and walked around the table and out of the room. In the hall outside, three of her nephews rumbled past her, jostling each other. One bumped her again as he went by.

“Sorry, Aunty Kate.”

You will be.

She felt a smile spread across her lips. This was a feeling she liked.

She moved to the front door, pulling it open. The moment she stepped into the sunlight, she was hit by a powerful feeling of crossing an imaginary threshold. Behind, inside the house, the noise of
them
traveled to her. The chatter over nothing. The laughter at unfunny quips. The faux arguments on politics, which went nowhere. With each footstep down the short set of stairs and along the pathway to the drive, her mind began to clear. The gnawing buzz faded, leaving behind a beautiful golden peace.

Today was the day she would step off the treadmill. Today was the day she would make a stand. One thing she’d learned over these wasted years of marriage, it was that actions speak louder than words. Kate was about to get loud.

IDIOT BOY’S GREATEST FEAR WAS being car-jacked. Thanks to this, a gun was always stowed in the glove compartment. Twice a year he’d take Kate to a practice range to “brush up on her skills.”

Kate climbed into the passenger seat, then unlocked and opened the compartment. It was her job to keep the compartment key safe while he drove, because he figured a car-jacker would go for him first. Somehow, she would access the gun and save the day. Or night.

The revolver sat nestled in a soft cloth bag, innocuous and innocent. You could mistake it for nothing more than a pouch for storing coupons and spare change.

Pulling the weapon from its concealment, she wrapped her hand around the barrel. It felt surprisingly good and moral in her palm. The buzzing had returned, and she felt odd like her body didn’t belong to her anymore. Kate pulled down the visor, flipping open the cover of the fixed mirror to stare at a woman she didn’t recognize. This person sported gray roots, several weeks overdue for a color; a sallow face, creased as though she’d just awoken from a bad sleep; and blank eyes, underlined by dark semi-circles. This poor creature was a lost ghost. How had this happened? When did she become this woman?

She pushed up the visor, thinking what to do next.

“A necessary evil,” said the voice in her head. She knew this voice. Liked this voice. Wanted to please this voice. Whose voice it was she didn’t know. Now she thought about it, she didn’t care. The voice was right. This felt like a necessary evil. In fact, evil was the wrong word.
Life changing
, more accurate.

The words,
straight and true
, circled in her mind.

Her hand folded over the gun. Instantly, it felt like an extension of her body. She pushed on the car door; it squealed as though excited, as if the door were screaming,
yes
! The sound, tenfold louder than when she’d entered the car; the world, suddenly amplified. Kate touched a hand to her ear, now aching as though infected.

Half way up the path, she heard them inside—still laughing, still drinking their coffee, still prattling about inconsequential minutia (she could insert manure for minutia—
manuritia
—and it would be more apt).

The aqua-green door loomed. Standing before it, she experienced a momentary feeling of being a shrunken Alice in Wonderland after swallowing the
drink me
potion. Then the awareness of the gun in her hand grew her back bigger than her normal size, like Alice with the
eat me
cookie.

Kate watched as her hand reached out toward the barrier—that’s how she thought of the door, as a barrier to her mission. Her shoulder pushed into it as though her body was possessed of its own mind, she merely a passenger.

The barrier swung open. Inside the voices from the dining room flew at her like marauding demons. The sound assaulted not just her ears but her entire body. Her index finger tingled as she nestled it into the trigger, as though it were the most natural thing in the world: to bring a gun to a family gathering.

Three steps forward to the right would take her to the living room. Through there, she could enter via the rear of the dining room. Kate paused, thinking it through.
No, not that way first.
Her mission required more of her than randomly shooting at these people. There were criteria.